Recognizing the
Church

A Personal Pilgrimage & the Discovery
of Five Marks of the Church

by Thomas Howard

Iwas brought up in an Evangelical household. To say this
is to say something good. My father was a layman, not a preacher; but he was
a devoted and
assiduous daily student of the Bible. He and my mother exist to this day
in my
imagination as the very icons of the godly man and woman. It was a wonderful
thing—that sage, earnest, transparent, Bible-centered faith. I owe
the fact that I am
a believer today, and that my whole pilgrimage, steep and tortuous as it
has been
sometimes, has been towards the center, not away from it, to the faith and
prayers
and example of my father and mother.

I believe that I and my five brothers and sisters, all of whom, now, in our
sixties, are Christians who want to follow the Lord wholly, would all testify
to this
godly influence of our parents. The household was a household suffused with
the
Bible. We sang hymns—daily—hundreds of them over the years, so
that probably
all six of us know scores of hymns by heart. We had family prayers twice a
day, after
breakfast and after supper. Our parents prayed with us at our bedside, the
last
thing at night. We all went to Sunday school and church regularly.

There is only one agenda in a fundamentalist Sunday school: the Bible. The
Bible day in and day out, year in and year out. Flannelgraph lessons, sword
drills,
Scripture memory: Everything was focused directly on the Bible itself. I am
grateful
for every minute of this, now, 50 years later. Because of this, the whole of
Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is ringing in my ears all the time.
Hundreds
of verses, in the language of the King James Version, are there, intact, in
my memory.
I hope that, if my memory fails and I lose my wits in my old age, perhaps these
verses, from so long ago, will remain there and bring me solace.

The Christian believers among whom I grew up were very forthcoming
about the faith. They spoke easily and informally about the Lord. When you
were
among them, you knew that you were among people of “like precious faith,” as
St. Peter phrases it. Many of the guests in our household had been overseas
missionaries,
some of them interned in concentration camps by the Japanese during
World War II. Our ears were full of stories of how God had been faithful in
all sorts
of human extremities. It would be hard to find a better ambiance, I think,
than this
good and trusty Evangelicalism of my youth.

The Pilgrimage Begins

But I speak as one whose pilgrimage has led him from the world of Protestant
Evangelicalism to the Roman Catholic Church. One way or another, all of us
whose nurture has been in one of the sectors of Protestantism where the Bible
is
honored, where the gospel is preached without dissimulation, and where Jesus
Christ is worshipped as God and Savior—all of us desire to be faithful
to the ancient
faith that we profess, and to be found obedient to the will of God. Certainly
such
fidelity and obedience have motivated us so far, and we want to be able to
give an
accounting of ourselves when it comes to our turn at the Divine Tribunal, for
we
must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Why then, would anyone want to leave such a world? Was not that a rendering
of the ancient faith almost without equal? Surely to leave it would be to go
from great plenty out to famine and penury?

Of my own case, I would have to say that I did not want to leave it. Certainly
I was restless as a young man, like all young men, and any grass across any
fence
tended to look very green. I did, out of mere curiosity, draw back from the
little
church of my parents and my childhood when I returned to my hometown after
having graduated from college and put in my time in the army. I visited the
local
Presbyterian church, and the Methodist and the Lutheran and the Episcopalian.
Only this last one held any great attraction for me—I think it was a
matter of
aesthetics more than any other single factor. The Episcopal liturgy is the
most
elegant thing in the world, and this is to be attributed to their Prayer Book,
which
has since been supplanted by a modern translation, but which in 1960 was still
the
old Book of Common Prayer, with its matchless Shakespearean prose.
Episcopal
churches tend to be gothic, with stained glass and cool, dark interiors. Episcopal
hymnody is virtually the best in the world, if we are speaking of a rich treasury
of
hymns drawn from the era of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, as well as from
ancient Christendom. I was attracted by all of this. There was also a strange
note
of nostalgia in it, since I knew that my mother had been “saved” out of
Episcopalianism
into fundamentalism in about 1915, but that she still retained an
undying
love for Episcopal hymns and liturgy. Somehow that nostalgia had communicated
itself to me.

The next step in my pilgrimage was made easy. I found myself teaching at a
boys’ school in England, so this put me in the neighborhood of the Church
of
England. There is a robust Evangelical wing in this old church, so I did not
have to
“ leave” anything. I could have all this and heaven too, so to speak.
I was received
into the Church of England in 1962 and found myself among the best crowd of
all, I thought: Evangelicals who took the liturgy, and the atmosphere of Anglicanism,
for granted. I loved it.

When I returned to the United States and married, my wife, who was a wise
and holy woman, was fairly quickly received into the Episcopal Church—or
the
Anglican Church, as many prefer to call it—and our two children were
raised as
Anglicans. Fortunately, we found ourselves, both in New York in the early years
of
our marriage and then in Massachusetts, in parishes where the Scriptures were
honored and the gospel was preached and sturdy fellowship was central.

Liberalism & Worship

Two questions, I think, spring into the minds of people when they hear
of someone
opting into Anglicanism. First, what about the liberalism in these big Protestant
denominations? And second, doesn’t one have to settle into worship that
is dull and
lifeless since it is all canned and rote, leaving behind the wonderful spontaneity
and
freshness that marks the worship in the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches?

On the first question, there is only one answer, and that is yes, one does
have
to learn to live in a denomination that has very largely given itself over
to an extremely
liberal interpretation of Scripture and now, alas, of sexual morality. The
good and faithful souls in these Protestant denominations suffer over this,
of course,
and will tell you that they are trying to bear witness in the situation,
and that the
Church historically has been plagued always with heresy and sin, and that we
can’t
keep splitting and splitting, as we Evangelicals have done, in the interest
of doctrinal
or moral purity. You end up with an ecclesiastical flea market that way, such
people might urge.

On the second question, about canned and rote worship, we come to an immense
issue. What is at stake here is the rock-bottom question as to what worship
is and how you do it. Put briefly, the question comes to this: Worship
is the thing
that we were created for—to know God and, knowing him, to bless him and
adore
him forever. This is what the seraphim and the cherubim and all the angelic
hierarchy
do ceaselessly. This is what the creation is doing: The Psalms call upon winds
and mountains and seas and frost and hail and sun and stars to worship the
Most
High. We believe that in some very literal sense the entire creation does,
each part
of it after its own unique mode, “worship” him. But you and I belong
to the species
whose dignity entails leading the praises of our world.

To worship God is to ascribe worth to him. It is an activity distinct from
teaching, and from fellowship, and from witnessing, and from sharing. It is
an act,
not an experience. We come to church primarily to do something, not
to receive
something, although of course in the ancient worship of the Church we do indeed
receive God himself, under the sacramental species of Bread and Wine. But our
task in worship is to offer the oblation of ourselves and our adoration at
the Sapphire
Throne.

Obviously this is a daunting and an august task. Fortunately we are not left
to
our own resources, nor to the whim of the moment, nor even to our own experience.
The faithful have been worshipping God since the beginning, and there is
help for us. All of us, even those of us who come from the so-called free churches
where spontaneity is supposed to be the rule, are accustomed to borrowing secondhand,
canned words to assist us in worship. I am speaking of hymns. When we sing
“ Amazing Grace” or “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” we
are borrowing John
Newton’s and Charles Wesley’s words. And we discover that, far
from cramping or
restricting our worship, these secondhand words bring us up to a level quite
unattainable
by our own spontaneous efforts. They take us away from ourselves.

That is another crucial point in ritual worship: People who are fellowshipping
with each other, and sharing, are, characteristically, facing each other. People
who
are worshipping are, all together, facing something else, namely the Sapphire
Throne.
The liturgy of the Church brings us into these precincts. Our Lord Jesus Christ
was accustomed to this kind of worship—indeed, when he joined his parents
and
fellow Jews in weekly worship, he entered into the ritual. No one had ever
heard of
spontaneous public worship. The early Church, in great wisdom, realized that
this
is a principle that goes to the root of the mystery of our being. Spontaneity
is a
good and precious thing. The Lord loves any lisping, stammering, broken, and
halting words we can offer to him, as he loves the buzzing of bumblebees and
the
braying of donkeys. But when we come together for the particular act of
offering
our corporate, regular, recurring adoration to him, then we need a form.

The Question of the Church

During my 23 years as an Anglican, I discovered, and gradually became
at home
in, the world of liturgy, and of sacrament, and of the church year. But also
as I read
in theology and church history and in the tradition of Christian spirituality,
I found
myself increasingly acutely conscious of a question: But what is the Church?

Every Sunday at the Anglican liturgy I found myself repeating, “I believe
in
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” These are words from an era
that all of
us—Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, and unaffiliated—must
take seriously,
since all of us, whether we are pleased to admit it or not, are the direct
beneficiaries of the work of the men who hammered out those words. You and
I may
think, in some of our less reflective moments, that all we need is the Bible
and our
own wits. Sola Scriptura. Just me and my Bible. But that is an impertinent
notion.
Every Christian in every assembly of believers in this world is incalculably
in the
debt of the men who succeeded the apostles. For they are the ones who, during
those
early centuries when the Church was moving from the morning of Pentecost out
into the long haul of history, fought and thought and worked and wrote and
died,
so that “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” might
indeed be handed on.
Heresiarchs popped up out of the weeds left, right, and center, and all of
them
believed in the “verbal inspiration” of Scripture. It was the Church,
in her bishops
and councils, that preserved the faith from the errors of the heresiarchs and
other
zealots, and that shepherded the faithful along in the Way, as it was called.
You and I, insofar as we are familiar with modern Protestantism and, a
fortiori,
with Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, are familiar with a state of affairs
that
would have been unimaginable to our Fathers in the faith in those early days.
I am
referring to the oddity that, even though we all say we believe in the final
and fixed
truth of divine revelation, we are nevertheless all at odds when it comes to
deciding
just what that truth is.

Oh, to be sure, we all agree on the so-called fundamentals of the gospel—but
of course those fundamentals have been articulated and distilled for us by
the
Church that wrote the creeds. The Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and the
modernists all toil away at the pages of the Bible, but you and I would say
they are
not getting the right things out of that Bible. Why do we say that? Because,
whether
we acknowledge it or not, our “orthodox” understanding of the Bible
has been
articulated for us by the Church. All sorts of notions, for example,
have cropped up
about the Trinity, about the mystery of Our Lord’s divine and human natures,
and
so forth. The reason you and I are not Nestorians or Eutychians or Apollinarians
or
Docetists or Arians or Montanists is that the Church guarded and
interpreted and
taught the Bible, and we, the faithful, have had a reliable and apostolic voice
in the
Church that says, “ This is what Holy Scripture is to be understood
as teaching,
and that which you hear Eutychius or Sabellius teaching from the
Bible is not to be
believed.”

But I was speaking of the question that began to force its way into my mind
during those years: What is the Church? What may have appeared as a digression
just now, when I referred to the men who worked so hard to preserve the faith,
and
the bishops and councils who settled upon the right understanding of revelation,
was not a digression at all. When I heard myself repeating the words from the
Nicene Creed at the liturgy, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
church,”
I was, of course, saying words that are not directly from any one text in the
Bible
and yet that have been spoken in all of Christendom for a millennium and a
half
now and in some sense constitute a plumbline for us.

The creed is not Scripture; that is true. But then all of us, whether we come
from groups that repeat the creed or not, would agree, “Oh yes, indeed;
that is the
faith which we all profess.” Some would add, “But of course, we
get it straight out
of the Bible. We don’t need any creed.” The great difficulty here
is that Eutychius
and Sabellius and Arius got their notions straight out of the Bible
as well. Who will
arbitrate these things for us? Who will speak with authority to us faithful,
all of us
rushing about flapping the pages of our well-thumbed New Testaments, locked
in
shrill contests over the two natures of Christ, or baptism, or the Lord’s
Supper, or
the mystery of predestination?

This question formed itself in the following way for me, a twentieth-century
Christian: Who will arbitrate for us between Luther and Calvin? Or between
Luther
and Zwingli, both appealing loudly to Scripture, and each with a view of the
Lord’s
Table that categorically excludes the other’s view? And who will arbitrate
for us
between John Wesley and George Whitefield—that is, between Arminius and
Calvin? Or between J. N. Darby (he thought he had found the biblical
pattern for
Christian gathering, and the Plymouth Brethren to this day adhere to his teaching)
and all the denominations? Or between the dispensationalists and the Calvinists
on the question of eschatology?

A piquant version of this situation presented itself to us loosely affiliated
Evangelicals, with all of our independent seminaries and Grace chapels and
Moody
churches, and so forth. When a crucial issue arises—say, what we should
teach
about sexuality—who will speak to us with a finally authoritative voice?
The best
we can do is to get Christianity Today to run a symposium, with one
article by
J. I. Packer plumping for traditional morality, and one article by one of our
lesbian
feminist Evangelicals (there are some) showing that we have all been wrong
for the
entire 3,500 years since Sinai, and that what the Bible really teaches is that
indeed
homosexuals may enjoy a fully expressed sexual life. The trouble here is that
J. I. Packer has no more authority than our lesbian friend, so the message
to the
faithful is, “Take your pick.”

This is not, whatever else we wish to say about it, a picture of things that
would be recognizable to the apostles, or to the generations that followed
them.
The faithful, in those early centuries, were certainly aware of a great babel
of voices
among the Christians, teaching this and teaching that, on every conceivable
point
of revelation. But the faithful were also aware that there was a body that
could
speak into the chaos, and declare, with serene and final authority, what the
faith
that had been taught by the apostles was. Clearly, we Evangelicals have been
living
in a scheme of things altogether unrecognizable to the apostles and the Fathers
of
the Church.

“ I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,” I found
myself saying
in the creed. What Church? What is the Church? What was the Church in the
minds of the men who framed that creed? Clearly it was not the donnybrook that
the world sees nowadays, with literally thousands of groups, big and small,
all
clamoring, and all claiming to be, in some sense, the Church.

Five Recognizable Marks of the Church

As an Anglican I became aware that I, as an individual believer, stood
in a very long
and august lineage of the faithful, stretching back to the apostles and fathers.
The
picture had changed for me: It was no longer primarily me, my Bible, and Jesus
(although heaven knows that is not altogether a bad picture: the only question
is,
is it the whole picture?). Looming for me, as an Anglican, was “the faith,” ancient,
serene, undimmed, true. And that faith somehow could not be split apart from “the
Church.” But then, what was the Church?

I realized that, one way or another, I had to come to terms with the Church
in
all of its antiquity, its authority, its unity, its liturgy, and its sacraments.
Those five
marks, or aspects, of the Church are matters that all of us, I think, would
find to be
eluding us in the free churches. I speak as a Roman Catholic, for that is where
my
own pilgrimage has brought me in my quest for this Church in all of its antiquity,
authority, unity, liturgy, and sacraments. Let me touch on each of these briefly.

Antiquity

First, the antiquity of the Church confronts me. As an Evangelical,
I discovered
while I was in college that it was possible to dismiss the entire Church as
having
gone off the rails by about a.d. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew
better
than old Ignatius or Polycarp or Clement, who had been taught by the apostles
themselves—we knew better than they just what the Church is and what
it should
look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable
to them, or that our church government would have been equally unrecognizable,
or that the vocabulary in which we spoke of the Christian life would have been
equally unrecognizable. We were right, and the Fathers were wrong. That settled
the matter.

The trouble here was that what these wrong-headed men wrote—about God,
about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian’s
walk and
warfare—was so titanic, and so rich, and so luminous, that their error
seemed
infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it
was I, not
they, who was under surveillance. The “glorious company of the apostles,
the noble
army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world” (to quote
the
ancient hymn, the Te Deum) judge me, not I them. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement,
Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Cyril, Basil, the Gregorys, Augustine, Ambrose,
Hilary,
Benedict—it is under the gaze of this senate that I find myself standing.
Alas. How
tawdry, how otiose, how flimsy, how embarrassing, seem the arguments that I
had
been prepared, so gaily, to put forward against the crushing radiance of their
confession.
The Church is here, in all of its antiquity, judging me.

Authority

Second, the Church in its authority confronts me. That strange authority
to bind
and to loose that our Lord bestowed on his disciples has not evaporated from
the
Church—or so the Church has believed from the beginning. If you will
read the
story of those decades that followed Pentecost, and especially that followed
upon
the death of the apostles, you will discover that the unction to teach and
to preside
in the Church that passed from the apostles to the bishops was understood to
be
an apostolic unction. I, for example, could not start up out of the bulrushes
and
say, “Hi, everybody! The Lord has led me to be a bishop! I’m starting
me a church
over here.” The whole Christian community—bishops, presbyters,
deacons, and
laity—would have looked solemnly at me and gone about their business.

The Holy Spirit, in those days, did not carry on private transactions with
isolated souls, and then announce to the Church that so-and-so had been anointed
for this or that ministry. The unction of the Holy Spirit, and the authority
of the
Church to ordain for ministry, were not two random enterprises. The Holy Spirit
worked in, and through, the Church’s ministry and voice. To be sure,
he could do
what he wanted to do, as he had always done, being God. Under the Old Covenant,
we could say that he worked in and through Israel; but of course you find
these extra characters like Job and Jethro and the Magi, coming across the
stage
from outside the Covenant, yet nonetheless undeniably having been in touch
with
God. God can do what he wants, of course.

But the Church understands herself to be the appointed vessel for God’s
working,
just as the Incarnation was. Her authority is not her own. She arrogates nothing
to herself. Her bishops and patriarchs are the merest custodians, the merest
passers-on, we might say, of the deposit of faith. As a Roman Catholic, I am,
of
course, acutely conscious of this. When someone objects to me, “But who
does the
Catholic Church think she is, taking this high and mighty line” (about
abortion or
about sexual morality or about who may or may not come to the Lord’s
Table), the
answer is, “She doesn’t think she’s anything particular,
if you mean that she has set
herself up among the wares in the flea market as somehow the best. She has
her
given task to do—to pass on the teaching given by the apostles, and she
has no
warrant to change that. She is not taking her cues from the Nielsen ratings,
or from
a poll, or even from a sociological survey as to what people feel comfortable
with
nowadays. She didn’t start the Church, and it’s not her Church.”

As a free-church Christian, one can, of course, make up one’s mind about
lots
of things. Shall I fast or not? Well, that’s for me to decide. Shall
I give alms? Again—
a matter for my own judgment. Must I go to church? That, certainly, is my own
affair. Need I observe this or that feast day in the church year? I’ll
make up my own
mind. Piety and devotion are matters of one’s own tailoring: No one may
peer over
my shoulder and tell me what to do.

Indeed, no one may do anything of the sort— if we are speaking
of ourselves
as Americans who have constitutional rights. But if we are speaking of ourselves
as
Christian believers, then there is a touchstone other than the Constitution
by which
our choices must be tested.

Our Christian ancestors knew nothing of this sprightly individualism when it
came to the disciplines of the spiritual life. They fasted on Fridays, and
they went
to church on Sundays. Some Roman pope did not make these things up. They
took shape in the Church very early, and nobody dreamed of cobbling up a private
spirituality. And likewise with all sorts of questions. Shall women be ordained
as
priests? It is, eventually, not a matter of job description, or of politics,
or even of
common sense or public justice. The question is settled by what the Church
understands
the priesthood to be—with cogent reasoning given, to be sure. It is not
a
question to be left interminably open to the public forum for decade after
decade
of hot debate.

The Church is here, in all of its authority, judging us.

Unity

Third, the Church in its unity confronts me. This is the most difficult
and daunting
matter. But one thing eventually became clear: My happy Evangelical view of
the
church’s unity as being nothing more than the worldwide clutter that
we had under
our general umbrella was, for good or ill, not what the ancient Church had
understood by the word unity. As an Evangelical, I could pick which
source of
things appealed most to me: Dallas Seminary; Fuller Seminary; John Wimber;
Azusa Street; the Peninsula Bible Church; Hudson Taylor; the deeper life as
taught
at Keswick; Virginia Mollenkott; John Stott; or Sam Shoemaker. And in one sense,
variety is doubtless a sign of vigorous life in the Church. But in another
sense, of
course, it is a disaster. It is disastrous if I invest any of the above with
the authority
that belongs alone to the Church. But then who shall guide my choices?

Once again, we come back to the picture that we have in the ancient Church.
Whatever varieties of expression there may have been—in Alexandria as
over against
Lyons or in Antioch as over against Rome—nevertheless, when it came to
the faith
itself, and also to order and discipline and piety in the Church, no one was
left
groping or mulling over the choices in the flea market.

Where we Protestants were pleased to live with a muddle—even with stark
contradiction (as in the case of Luther versus Zwingli, for example)—the
Church
of antiquity was united. No one needed to remain in doubt for long as to what
the
Christian Church might be, or where it might be found. The Montanists were
certainly zealous and earnest, and had much to commend them; the difficulty,
finally, was that they were not the Church. Likewise with the Donatists.
God bless
them for their fidelity and ardor and purity, but they were not the Church.
As
protracted and difficult as the Arian controversy was, no one needed to remain
forever in doubt as to what the Church had settled upon: Athanasius was fighting
for the apostolic faith, against heresy. It did not remain an open
question forever.

There was one Church and the Church was one. And this was a discernible,
visible, embodied unity, not a loose aggregate of vaguely like-minded believers
with their various task forces all across the globe. The bishop of Antioch
was not
analogous to the general secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship or the
head
of the National Association of Evangelicals. He could speak with the full authority
of the Church behind him; these latter gentlemen can only speak for their own
organization. He was not even analogous to the stated clerk of the Presbyterian
Church or the presiding bishop of the Episcopalians, neither of whom is understood
by his clientele to be speaking in matters of doctrine and morality with an
undoubted apostolic authority.

This line of thought could bring us quickly to the point at which various voices
today might start bidding for our attention, each one of them with “Hey— ours is
the apostolic voice—over here!” That is not my task here. I only
would want to urge
you to test your own understanding of the Church against the Church’s
ancient
understanding of itself as united, as one. What is that unity? It is a matter
that has
perhaps been answered too superficially and frivolously for the last two hundred
years in American Protestantism. The Church in its unity is here, judging us.

Liturgy

Fourth, the liturgy of the Church confronts and judges me. That seems
like an odd
way of putting it: In what sense can anyone say that the liturgy “judges” me?
Certainly it does not condemn me or pass any sort of explicit judgment on me.
But
if only by virtue of its extreme antiquity and universality, it constitutes
some sort
of touchstone for the whole topic of Christian worship.

Often the topic is approached as though it were a matter of taste: John likes
fancy worship—smells and bells—and Bill likes simplicity and spontaneity
and
informality. There’s the end of the discussion. And certainly, as I mentioned
before,
God receives any efforts, however halting and homespun, which anyone offers
as worship, just as any father or mother will receive the offering of a limp
fistful
of dandelions as a bouquet from a tiny child. On the other hand, two considerations
might be put forward at this point.

First, what did the Church, from the beginning, understand by worship—
that is, by its corporate, regular act of worship? The Book of Acts gives us
little
light on the precise shape or content of the Christians’ gatherings:
The apostles’
doctrine, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers are mentioned.
St.
Paul’s Epistles do not spell out what is to be done. We have to look
to other early
writings if we are curious about the apostolic church’s worship. And
what we find
when we do so is the Eucharistic liturgy. This, apparently, was what they did
as
worship. If we think we have improved on that pattern, we may wish to submit
our
innovations for scrutiny to the early Church in order to discover whether our
innovations
have in fact been improvements.

Which brings us to the second consideration: the content of the Eucharistic
liturgy. From the beginning, the Church seems to have followed a given sequence:
readings from Scripture (including the letters from Paul and Peter and John),
then
prayers, and then the so-called anaphora—the “offering,” or,
as it was also called,
the Great Thanksgiving. This was the great Eucharistic Prayer, which took on
a
fairly exact shape at the outset, and which you may still hear if you listen
to the
liturgy in any of the ancient churches. Psalmody, canticles, and hymns also
came
to be included, and certain acclamations like the “Kyrie, eleison!” The
whole presents
a shape of such rich perfection that one wonders what exactly is the task of
the “coordinators of worship” on the staff of various churches.
The worship of the
ancient Church is far from being a matter of endless tinkering, experimenting,
and
innovating. The entire mystery of revelation and redemption is unfurled for
us in
the church’s liturgy. That liturgy is here in all of its plentitude,
majesty, and magnificence,
judging us.

Sacraments

Fifth and finally, the sacraments of the Church confront me. The
word sacrament
is the Latin word for the Greek mysterion, mystery. Indeed,
we are in the presence
of mystery here, for the sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, constitute
physical
points at which the eternal touches time, or the unseen touches the seen, or
grace
touches nature. It is the Gnostics and Manichaeans who want a purely disembodied
religion.

Judaism, and its fulfillment, Christianity, are heavy with matter. First, at
creation
itself, where solid matter was spoken into existence by the Word of God.
Then redemption, beginning not with the wave of a spiritual wand, nor with
mere
edicts pronounced from the sky, but rather with skins and blood—the pelts
of
animals slaughtered by the Lord God to cover our guilty nakedness. Stone altars,
blood, fat, scapegoats, incense, gold, acacia wood—the Old Covenant is
heavily
physical.

Then the New Covenant: We now escape into the purely spiritual and leave the
physical behind, right? Wrong. First a pregnancy, then a birth. Obstetrics
and gynecology,
right at the center of redemption. Fasting in the wilderness, water to wine,
a crown of thorns, splinters and nails and blood—our eternal salvation
carried out
in grotesquely physical terms. Then pure spirituality, right? Wrong. A corpse
resuscitated.
And not only that—a human body taken up into the midmost mysteries of
the eternal Trinity. And Bread and Wine, Body and Blood, pledged and given
to the
Church, for as long as history lasts. Who has relegated this great gift to
the margins
of Christian worship and consciousness? By what warrant did men, 1,500 years
after the Lord’s gift of his Body and Blood, decide that this was a mere
detail,
somewhat embarrassing, and certainly nothing central or crucial—a show-and-tell
device at best? O tragedy! O sacrilege! What impoverishment for the faithful!

May God grant, in these latter days, a gigantic ingathering, as it were, when
Christians who have loved and served him according to patterns and disciplines
and notions quite remote from those of the ancient Church find themselves taking
their places once again in the great Eucharistic mystery of his one, holy,
catholic,
and apostolic Church.

Adapted from a lecture given in 1993 to the Fellowship
of St. Barnabas
in Oklahoma City.

Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).

“Recognizing the Church” first appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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